Swimlanes glitch

[Teodor]

Bizarre glitch happened when configuring Swimlanes for my project.

The swimlanes were configured correctly, and I had the relevant issues that should appear in those swimlanes. So a swimlane should be showing up and displaying that issue in that swimlane. However it was not. Why?

I had other swimlanes configured using the same JQL formatting etc. that were working correctly. After pulling my hair out for a day, checking status names, editing the formatting, everything - still, the swimlane was not showing up. 

A colleague came over and played around with the order of the swimlanes, pushing the swimlane that was not showing up to the top of the kanban board. 

This made it appear. I had two other swimlanes with the same problem, but somehow going into board settings, moving the swimlanes to the top, made them appear on the board. 

If anyone can explain why this fixed this bug I would very much appreciate it! 

[Warren]

Hi Teodor

One possible explanation for this is the fact that an issue will only appear once on any board.

If I have query (swimlane) A which would return issues 1, 2, 3 and 4. Then I have query (swimlane) B which would return issues 3, 4, 5 and 6. If query A is above query B, then 3 and 4 (which are common) would appear within swimlane A and WOULDN'T appear in swimlane B, because they're already showing on the board somewhere.

[Teodor]

Hi Warren!

I see - so because Issue 1 was already configured to show up in swimlane A, even though I had configured a Swimlane B to show when Issue 1 is progressed into Status B, because it was already being displayed in Swimlane A it didnt generate Swimlane B.

But to me that seems odd, because isnt that the whole point of the swimlanes? 

[Warren]

The important statement in my answer above is

an issue will only appear once on any board

The queries work from the top down and once it's displayed in a swimlane, you'll not see it in any other swimlane.

You should try to come up with mutually exclusive queries, so that you don't have this problem.

[Teodor]

That makes sense, thank you!